Metro News & Reviews

Transportation headlines, Thursday, Nov. 5

Does anyone at the Metro library ever sleep? I doubt it. Plus, why sleep when there’s an entire Internet that must be scrubbed to find the latest, greatest transportation headlines for your reading pleasure.

The great transportation writer Tom Vanderbilt has a story at Slate that asks why the press has been paying so much attention lately to jaywalking? As Vanderbilt sees it, jaywalking can be problematic and lead to injury and death. But the far greater issue in his view is that conditions for pedestrians are often lousy at the expense of making conditions for cars better. He writes:

But the facts simply do not support the idea that jaywalking is the greatest danger pedestrians face, and that drivers should be let off the hook. In San Francisco, for example, a report by the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency looking at collisions in 2007 found that cases of drivers violating the pedestrian’s right of way were more common than pedestrians violating that of drivers. In New York City the Post, quoting numbers from the DoT, said 50 jaywalkers were killed annually; this is a high number to be sure, but just one-fourth the total pedestrian death toll.

The L.A. Times has a story today about a group called civLAvia that wants to see more streets shut down on Sundays so that cyclists can use them. I think it’s a fine idea — when I worked at that newspaper (I was put on waivers in March) I wrote a few blog items about all the other cities that close streets on weekends for cyclists, runners and pedestrians. Obviously there are concerns about creating traffic and impeding access to neighborhoods, but this sure feels like something a smart city pol could figure out and occasionally do in some parts of the city. And I bet it would be hugely popular: thousands showed up in 2003 when the Pasadena Freeway was briefly handed over to cyclists on a Sunday morning.

Which metro areas are people leaving and which metro areas are attracting domestic migrants? New Geography has a story that takes on the view that the young and educated are moving to certain hip areas of the country such as New York City. The website, using a lot of charts, makes the argument that, in fact, most domestic migrants are landing in sunbelt cities and other red states and that places such as New York and the greater L.A. area are seeing significant outflows of the young and hip.